One of the features of the web that I initially found exciting was the concept of platform independence. One could build a page in HTML and anyone using any browser on any machine running any operating system would be able to see that page and use it just the way its author intended.
I will pause here to allow the hollow laughter of web developers everywhere to fade to an echo and so not interrupt my thoughts.
The truth of the matter is that over the last fifteen or so years we have had a multitude of browsers that work differently on various platforms and that has made both the development and testing of web pages and applications far more time consuming and, therefore, expensive than necessary. At Meantime we develop in whatever we consider to be the most standards compliant browser at the time and test primarily in whatever is the most popular, and both of these are moving targets.
As you would expect, Microsoft have a major role in the history of browsers but it is a surprisingly chequered history. Bill Gates was famously dismissive of the Internet at the outset and, if memory serves me correctly, it was not until IE4 was released that Microsoft really found their feet in the marketplace. Their success lasted 18 months until early 1999 when IE5 was released.
The extent of IE5's problems can be inferred from the fact that, on this one occasion, Microsoft released an interim version of the browser, IE5.5. And when IE6 came out, it was widely agreed that unhappy IE5 users would have been better waiting for that than 'upgrading' to IE5.5. (I remember all this vividly; I was responsible for the team testing the Royal Bank of Scotland's Internet banking software at the time.)
Of course, all of this made life incredibly torrid for those people in organisations who were responsible for the software and applications architecture. It was a period beset with problems and costs, and this was during the period immediately following the nasty surprise cost of the Millennium Bug. But IE6 was stable and remained Microsoft's browser offering for five years.
Despite that long period of stability - or, arguably, because of it - there did not appear to be a strong appetite for change when IE7 came along or, a couple of years further down the line, IE8. And so we find ourselves in 2010 with many large organisations and particularly government departments still using IE6, which is now nine years old.
The problem is that an awful lot has happened in those nine years and right now is a particularly exciting time with the new HTML5 and CSS3 support in the latest browsers: Chrome already has it, as does Firefox 4, which is out in a mature beta, and so will IE9's public beta, which is released in just a couple of weeks' time.
And in the middle of all this excitement, the government has announced that they won't be upgrading from IE6. Such a move, they say, would be "a very large operation" potentially at "significant potential cost to the taxpayer". They say that it will be "more cost-effective in many cases to continue to use IE6 and rely on other measures, such as firewalls and malware-scanning software, to further protect public sector internet users."
This is such a short-sighted option that I don't feel I need spell out the various reasons why it is a bad idea. Indeed, the quote above makes it clear there is an attendant security risk which is a strong argument in itself.
What is perhaps less obvious is that as software is increasingly web-based, software that is used by local authorities, it is not a straightforward transition to move between browsers: there is a lot of regression testing and consequent redevelopment to be done.
But it's not satisfactory for government IT strategists to simply throw their hands up and say it's too difficult or too expensive to change. Yes, I understand this is supposed to be a time of austerity, but that doesn't mean that an economical solution can't be found. In six months' time we will have a clear view of which of the current crop of browsers is the best and, as a first step, this can be deployed across government departments. From there, a two year plan to migrate applications from IE6 to the new browser will get departments to the point where they can look at their next upgrade. Because this is a rolling process and not a one off. Government needs to recognise that fact and start to make the cultural change that will enable them to leverage the benefits of what is still a fast moving (and exciting) technology.
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